In searching for particular audio files on the Internet, it is useful to be able to determine the identity of untitled audio files as well as to confirm that titled audio files are what they purport to be. Although a human may conceivably make such determinations and confirmations by simply listening to the content of the audio files by playing them through a media player, such an approach is not always reliable. Also, a process such as this involving human judgment is inherently very slow.
Therefore, it is advantageous to employ a computer to determine the identity of untitled audio files as well as to confirm that titled audio files are what they purport to be. The computer can not only store a lot of information to assist in identifying an input audio file, it can also process that information very quickly.
In one technique employing a computer, an algorithm is used to uniquely identify audio file content. Using this approach, a master code is generated by performing the algorithm on content in a master audio file. By applying the same algorithm to the content of an input audio file, the calculated code may then be compared with the master code to determine a match.
Use of such an algorithm, however, does not always lead to proper identification, because the content of an audio file may not have exactly the same length of recording as the content of the master audio file, for example, by starting at a point a little later in time, thus giving rise to a calculated code that would not match the master code. Also, if the content of the input audio file contains noise spikes or background noise, this would also give rise to a calculated code that would not match the master code. Thus, in both of these cases, the stored content is not properly identified.